The Emergence of a Working Poor: Labour Markets,Neoliberalisation and Diverse Economies in Post‐Socialist Cities

Abstract: This paper examines the transformations of urban labour markets in two central European cities: Bratislava, Slovakia and Kraków, Poland. It highlights the emergence of in‐work poverty and labour market segmentation, which together are leading to a reconfiguration of the livelihoods and economic practices of urban households. The focus of the paper is on the growing phenomenon of insecure, poor‐quality, contingent labour. It examines the ways in which those who find themselves in, or on the margins of, contingent and insecure labour markets sustain their livelihoods. We ask how such workers and their households negotiate the segmentation of the labour market, the erosion of employment security and the emergence of in‐work poverty and explore the diverse economic practices of those who cannot rely solely on formal employment to ensure social reproduction. Further, we assess the articulations between labour market participation and exclusion, and other spheres of economic life, including informal and illegal labour, household social networks, state benefits and the use of material assets. We argue that post‐socialist cities are seeing a reconfiguration of class processes, as the materialities and subjectivities of class are remade and as the meaning of work and the livelihoods different forms of labour can sustain are changing.     

Shift Work,Childcare and Domestic Work: Divisions of labour in Canadian paper mill communities

The growing prevalence of shift work and non-standard working hours is challenging many taken-for-granted notions about family and household life. This article examines how rotating shift schedules shape household strategies with regard to childcare and unpaid domestic work. In 1993-94 in-depth interviews were conducted with 90 predominantly male newsprint mill-workers and their spouses living in three communities located in different regions of Canada. The analysis in this article is based on these interviews as well as data collected in a questionnaire survey administered to a much larger sample. The article focuses on the effects of rotating shifts and the extent to which household strategies differ between households with one or two wage-earners. The findings reveal that the onus for adjusting to shifts fell mainly on the spouses of mill-workers, who felt constrained in their own choices regarding employment and childcare by the demanding regimen of their partner's shift schedules. In the vast majority of households a traditional division of labour predominated with regard to both childcare and domestic work. When women quit paid employment to accommodate the schedules of shift-workers and ensure time for the family to be together, traditional values reassert themselves. Surprisingly, a high level of satisfaction with current shift schedules was found, despite the significant adjustments to family life they had necessitated. By comparing families employed in the same industry but living in three very different communities, the analysis underscores the importance of local circumstances in mediating the strategies households deploy in coping with shift work, especially with regard to childcare.     

Maria's Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post‐apartheid South Africa

The life of Maria Dlamini, a contract cleaner at the University of the Witwatersrand, is used to explore continuities and discontinuities between the apartheid labour regime and the neoliberal, post‐apartheid order in South Africa. As South African institutions have adopted neoliberal market strategies, the growth in the contracting‐out of cleaning has intensified work and reduced wages and benefits for many workers. Significantly, as was the case with the migrant labor system under apartheid, it has also increasingly displaced the burden of social reproduction onto the households and communities of the working poor. Whereas the racial spatial order under apartheid was dictated by national‐level political decisions, through use of the concept of “boundary drawing”, we show how the language of the market justifies new exclusions based upon the micro‐politics of the “rational” restructuring of institutions such as universities.     

THE VIRTUALIZATION OF URBAN YOUNG PEOPLE'S MOBILITY PRACTICES: A TIME‐GEOGRAPHIC TYPOLOGY

A time‐geographic approach, including time–space diaries and in‐depth interviews, is used to investigate the daily use and implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among a group of Swedish urban youth. We identify individual variations and nuances in ICT‐based practices in our respondents' social and spatial contexts. Using individual cases and detailed time‐geographic trajectories, we demonstrate how daily communicative actions – physical and virtual – are combined and integrated. From this we identify four ideal types of mobility practices: (i) home‐oriented, heavy Internet users; (ii) physically mobile, heavy mobile phone users; (iii) physically mobile, heavy Internet and mobile phone users; and (iv) home‐oriented, rarely mobile people (virtually and physically).     

Migrant workers,self‐reliance,and the propensity to hold income protection insurance by country of residence

Utilising a large comparative survey across 11 countries, it is shown that country effects condition the individual uptake of income protection insurance and that shared attributes, including labour market status, are important factors in determining the take‐up of income protection insurance, whatever the respondents' country of residence. We observed differences in the respondents' coping strategies, including self‐reliance, and were able to distinguish between migrant workers and those who work in their country of origin, along with the “special” case of the Australian respondents. These findings have implications for the ongoing debate on the labour market effects of globalisation and the significance of national institutions and regulatory practices.     

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.     

Father and Ford revisited: gender, class and employment change in the new millennium

In the last decade in Britain the combination of women's continued entry into the labour market and the restructuring of welfare provision has exacerbated the growing demands on individuals and households in their allocation of time between productive and reproductive labour and the contradictions between the two spheres, as well as time and income inequalities between the rich and the poor. Since the election of the new Labour government in 1997, the concept of work/life balance, as well as a range of other policies to address these divisions have been introduced. This paper addresses the nature of the changes in the last decade, through the perspective of gender and class divisions and critically assesses key debates about the changing nature of working life as well as current policy provisions to support the increasing individualization of employment.     

Neoliberalism and Suburban Employment: Western Sydney in the 1990s

During the past 15 years metropolitan planning strategies of the NSW state government have done little to address the spatial distribution of either employment or labour market equity within the metropolis. In the fast‐growing outer western suburbs, the government has focused on attracting business investment to increase the stock of local jobs and to improve employment ‘self‐sufficiency’— a dominantly neoliberal policy framework. This paper explores a widening gulf between the reality of outer urban change and this policy framework by considering changes in the location of jobs and in the employment experiences of residents in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). Evidence is drawn from census journey‐to‐work data (1991–2001). While holding a majority of manufacturing jobs in Sydney, GWS also experienced continued growth of jobs in service industries during the 1990s. Yet the relative importance of employment in the city's fast‐growth finance and business services sector still lags well behind that of inner and northern parts of the city. The focus on growing the regional stock of jobs has not addressed problems of labour market access faced by residents of particular localities and the goal of employment self‐sufficiency has not delivered greater equity to outer suburban labour markets. A focus on sufficiency of access to employment for residents of GWS draws attention not only to regional stocks of jobs but also to the provision of social infrastructure and state‐provided services to outer suburban populations as they continue to expand.     

Labour Control in the Tobacco Agro‐spaces: Migrant Agricultural Workers in South‐Western Ontario

International labour migration programs provide a vulnerable workforce that services various sectors in developed economies. The agriculture sector is one arena in which the employment of migrant workers has become more pervasive. Annually, approximately 30,000 workers are employed in the Canadian agriculture sector through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). In this paper, I focus on the SAWP workers in tobacco farming, and investigate the ways that labour control is achieved on two small‐scale farms. I draw upon original empirical evidence from interviews with three Mexican and nine Jamaican workers, two union representatives, and two farm owners in South‐Western Ontario, Canada. My findings show that various factors at multiple scales shape the labour control regime and significantly advantage farm owners over workers. Based on my findings, I argue that the labour control regime is conditioned exogenously by multi‐scalar factors and generated endogenously at the point of production.     

Many Chains to Break: The Multi‐dimensional Concept of Slave Labour in Brazil

This article examines the concept of slave labour through two case studies from Brazil. One involves internal migrant workers and the other cross‐border migrant workers. There have been accusations of slave labour in both cases. I argue that slave labour is a multi‐dimensional concept and that cognate notions (eg forced and unfree labour) could also be reconceived as multi‐dimensional. Recent works have proposed that a continuum viewing labour relations as more or less free should replace dichotomies such as free vs unfree. I argue for taking this further to recognise, first, that workers may be more or less free in different ways, and second, that the resulting conditions of employment can be characterised as more or less degrading, also in different ways. This multi‐dimensional approach allows for a better understanding of the heterogeneity of apparently unfree labour relations and for greater recognition of the agency of workers labelled as slaves.     

RURAL–URBAN SPATIAL INTERACTION IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: LONG‐DISTANCE MOBILITY CHANGES,DESIRES AND RESTRICTIONS OVER TWO DECADES IN RURAL PHILIPPINES

The spatial interaction between rural and urban areas is intense in the Global South. While research into how this interaction influences livelihood opportunities is extensive, longitudinal identification and analysis of rural people's long‐distance mobility is rudimentary. This is problematic given the possible repercussions of a greater flow of people for transport system management (congestion, emissions, investments, social exclusion, etc.). Based on longitudinal survey data from 1990 to 2008/2009, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the long‐distance mobility behaviour of households and individuals has changed over a period of intensified rural–urban interaction in a rural Philippine area. The article furthermore addresses the individuals' mobility desires and restrictions related to long‐distance travel. The results indicate that both accessibility effects and effects related to information and communication technology (ICT), concentration of activities and opportunities towards major cities, age, labour market, and economic situation. Over time, particularly since improved accessibility conditions have enabled much faster travelling, more people have come to travel more frequently (although a suppressed demand is still present and inequalities are considerable) to more distant destinations, major cities in particular, for mainly social motives. A recent countertrend is evident, partly arising from mobile phones replacing physical movement. The increase in private vehicle ownership has so far been slow, so modal choice is still highly sustainable. Overall, the findings support core ideas derived from the new economic geography, but also notes, with earlier studies in transport geography, that travel time is a prime consideration.     

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

Informed by labour geography's thrust to situate workers as active subjects of analysis, this article examines lived experiences of restructuring at Australia's single largest industrial workplace. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article traverses three restructuring outcomes faced by workers and their families: (1) job retention; (2) redundancy; and (3) re‐employment. Amid the turbulence and uncertainty of a major workplace restructuring episode, workers' different lived experiences illuminate uneven intra‐labour power relations. As capitalist workplaces are re‐organised and labour processes redefined, more conflictual and divisive relationships often develop among groups of workers differentially positioned within the hierarchical labour markets of large firms. Emphasising restructuring episodes as generative contexts for grounded labour geographies research, the article develops intra‐labour agency as a critical analytical frame to explore more deeply the agency implications of workplace structures, co‐worker relationships, and social life matters that shape workers' capacities for action inside and beyond workplaces.     

Labour Control and Developmental State Theory: A New Perspective on Import‐substitution Industrialization in Latin America

Drawing on historical research into the period of import‐substitution industrialization (ISI) in Chile and Argentina between the 1930s and 1960s, this article claims that developmental state theory (DST) obfuscates a crucial feature of state intervention in Latin America. Specifically, despite a long‐standing interest in state–society relations, DST has been unable to incorporate adequately into its analytical framework labour–state relations and labour control in the workplace. This is because DST, in its various guises, privileges state–society relations mediated by institutions from which labour is implicitly or explicitly excluded. Extending the analytical lens of DST, the article combines critical labour‐relations and labour‐process theories to identify the purposive establishment of ‘regimes of labour control’ via changes in institutional and workplace relations. Using this expanded framework, it shows how the often vacillating strategies pursued by the state under ISI in Chile and Argentina, and the inefficient outcomes of ISI in these countries, can be better understood by considering efforts designed to exert control over labour.     

Determinants of Variation in Population–Employment Interaction Findings: A Quasi‐Experimental Meta‐Analysis. 人口‐就业相互作用的决定因素研究：一种准实验元分析法

This article reports about a metaregression analysis of empirical results generated using data for the northern Netherlands (1988–2002) in order to investigate the ambiguity in results in the population–employment interaction literature. Specifically, the analysis deals with the issue whether “jobs follow people” or “people follow jobs.” The article starts with introducing the basics of quasi‐experimental meta‐analysis and with identifying some advantages of using quasi‐experimental meta‐analysis as compared with the standard meta‐analysis approach. Two subsequent sections document the selection of the population–employment interaction model and salient characteristics of the data set as well as the setup of the primary analyses. A total of 4,050 quasi‐experimental empirical results for the jobs–people direction of causality are generated using different specifications and estimators for a spatial econometric interaction model. The subsequent metaregression analysis reveals that the empirical results are largely shaped by the spatial, temporal, and employment characteristics of the data sampling. The results also appear much more sensitive to different measurements of the model's key variables when compared with alternative specifications of the spatial weights matrix. The main determinant driving empirical results about jobs–people causality are differences in model specification and estimation, as revealed by an inherent bias in parameter estimates and misguided inferences for some of the commonly used specifications. Finally, suggestions for future research are identified.     

Social Policy and Gender Divisions of Domestic and Care Work in France

A number of cross-national comparisons of gender divisions of paid and unpaid labour have highlighted the mismatch which exists in France between on the one hand a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of women's employment, supported by extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare, and on the other hand, the persistence of an unexpectedly traditional gender division of domestic and care work. This results in high levels of work–life conflict for French women, and particularly for mothers. In much social policy analysis, the question of how policy might influence the extent to which domestic and care work is shared within the couple has been largely overlooked in favour of discussions of how the state facilitates and encourages the employment of mothers of dependent children. This article therefore focuses on why and how state policy in France, whilst being successful in bringing women and particularly mothers into the labour market, has not brought about a fairer gender division of unpaid domestic and care work in the home.     

‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re‐appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.     

LABOUR MOBILITY AND PLANT PERFORMANCE: ON THE (DIS)SIMILARITY BETWEEN LABOUR‐ AND CAPITAL‐INTENSIVE SECTORS FOR KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION AND PRODUCTIVITY

In this article we analyse differences between capital‐ and labour‐intensive sectors with regard to the impact of workforce composition and labour mobility on plant performance. By the use of geo‐referenced longitudinal employer–employee data on a micro level, we analyse labour flows between plants within and between labour market regions. The analysis is carried out using weighted least squares (WLS) regression analysis combined with additional variance analysis (ANOVA). The results show that there are differences between the sectors with regard to both in‐house workforce composition and type of skill inflow. A high degree of related knowledge in the in‐house workforce has a strong positive effect on plant performance in the labour‐intensive sectors. The analysis of labour inflow indicates that knowledge in the capital‐intensive sectors is localized – only intra‐regional labour flows give rise to increased plant productivity. In the labour‐intensive sectors, the geographic and cognitive dimensions complement one another; similar knowledge needs to be non‐local in order to be beneficial to plant performance, and unrelated knowledge mainly contributes to plant productivity growth when it is local.     

‘Life is War’: Informal Transport Workers and Neoliberalism in Tanzania 1998–2009

This article analyses how informal labourers fare under flexible labour markets and economic liberalization, through a case study of transport workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It highlights the mainstream conceptualization of urban informality as self‐employment and its influence on policy. The article stresses the importance of class differentiation in the Dar es Salaam transport sector and the predominance of informal wage employment, the uneven degree of power commanded by bus owners vis‐à‐vis informal unskilled wage workers and the pernicious consequences of the lack of regulation of the employment relationship on the workforce itself and on society. It then interrogates the criminalization of the workforce and shows how labour over‐supply, its fragmentation and geographical dispersion explain workers’ lack of response to their plight. The longitudinal study of the rise and fall (1998–2005) of a labour association within the sector further highlights the tensions among the workforce and the forms and limits of their solidarity. The conclusion of this study suggests some policy implications.     

A Life‐cycle Model of Locational Choice in a Two‐region Economy*

The ability to use the amenities or other characteristics of a location may be a function of the length of time a household has resided in the location. We explore the implications of the hypothesis that the enjoyment of regional amenities depends on the accumulation of amenity‐specific human capital. We establish that the interaction of this human capital with regional wage rates determines life‐cycle locational trajectories. The model explains the timing of moves in the working and retirement periods of life as well as observed heterogeneity in household behavior. Small differences between households may result in dramatically different life‐cycle behavior.     

Farms and families in ninth‐century Provence

Information about the people recorded in 813–14 on the estate of St Victor de Marseilles shows that although considered to belong to the monastery they were an independent peasant class. Family size and structure varied: some farms were run by the labour of the family which included unmarried sons and ‘married‐in’ sons‐in‐law; other farmers employed living‐in servants in husbandry. The mountain sheep farms had large groups of unmarried young people. Inheritance systems ensured that the peasant family property remained intact over the generations and provided support for unmarried sons who remained to work there.